Research Projects
The Visuality of Memory
recent research projects on transnational mobilities and post-violence knowledge production in the Iberian AtlanticHow do memory practices mobilize the visual traces left by dictatorship, empire, and political transition in order to contest closed definitions of citizenship and belonging?
Revolution & Return.
How do individuals and collectivities mobilize photography and film to make sense of revolution and return in contemporary Portugal? How do narratives regarding political change and the end of empire collide in attempts to produce knowledge about the past? How do of return migration destabilize narratives about empire and revolution that are key to reproducing shared ideas regarding Portuguese identity?
Undoing Absence.
In a context marked by cultural forgetting, legal amnesty and economic austerity, forensic science plays a central role in unearthing Spain’s forgotten past. How do contemporary Spaniards mobilize photographs, documents, and human remains to produce new forms of historical knowledge? How do these practices reinvent local ideas about the social weight of evidence, the reach of justice, and the writing of collective history?
Ephemeral Traces.
Art has long been concerned with the process of making evident acts of violence otherwise unseen. But, what happens when artistic practices leave no material trace? Unpacking curatorial labor, I consider how a Spanish museum grapples with the representational politics of narrating violence. What histories are revealed when the “un-collectionable” becomes a contemporary art object? What stories are produced through art practices that move?
*** Trigger Warning: This Worlds of Absence Project description includes images of human remains.***
